1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to improving user experience on a network, and more specifically, to optimizing video caching in a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, have become prevalent in recent years. Given the advances in mobile computing power and far-reaching wireless Internet access, more and more users view streamed videos on their mobile devices. These streamed videos are often streamed at varying qualities, frame rates, frame sizes and compression levels from the various sources users access with their mobile devices. In many cases, videos available on the network are not optimized for wireless transmission or viewing on mobile devices and are streamed at a given quality from the source agnostic to network conditions. For example, an unoptimized video may have a quality level sufficient to provide users with a good viewing experience on a computer monitor or television. As a result, an unnecessarily large portion of bandwidth may be used to stream an unoptimized video when a smaller portion would suffice for providing an equivalent user viewing experience on the smaller display of the mobile device.
Existing network providers or media sources have attempted to improve the bandwidth usage during video streaming by performing a video optimization on the streamed video. Optimization often involves transcoding a source file such as a video into a format that more closely fits the capabilities of mobile devices or the network provider's system. While optimization does improve the bandwidth usage with little impact on the quality of the streamed video as viewed on a mobile device, the optimization process usually causes a delay in video streaming and playback as servers begin the transcoding process. These delays ultimately cause an adverse effect on the user's viewing experience, which may lead to the user stopping the video streaming early or switching to another streaming site.